ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about Aluisio Azevedo's O mulato which is Brazil's first novel to take determinist precepts as a central theme, probing the relationship between science and human identity. The novel thus offers an example of a Brazilian intellectual framing arguments about how emerging scientific theories of evolutionary biology can reshape people understanding of the self and human identity. Reading O mulato for the ways it handles Darwinism and a wide range of fin-de-siecle anxieties about race, degeneration and heredity helps them to appreciate the transnational flow of scientific ideas and the creative work of Brazilian intellectuals probing the connections between culture and biology. Neither fully embracing nor rejecting determinist science, O mulato, confronts questions about innate differences between race and gender, offering conflicted accounts of identity and the consequences of miscegenation. This fictional work probes the realness of race at the moment when evolutionary theory offers new explanations for human differences.
